According to the mainstream climate change alarmist position, carbon dioxide increases since the industrial age, are causing untold dangerous events, such as the melting of the poles, especially Antarctica, which is mostly ice on a land mass, rather than free-floating ice, so that if the land-based ice melts, catastrophic sea level rises will occur. Or, so the story now drummed into every school child goes.
However, there is a major problem here. A paper just published in Science Advances, “Early Sea Ice Decline Off East Antarctica at the Last Glacial–Interglacial Climate Transition,” has shown that ice core and other geophysical data indicates that in the past a rise in carbon dioxide levels occurred a substantial time after, not before warming periods. Worse, for the mainstream climate change position, a vast amount of melting occurred in Antarctica from 21,000 to 19,500 years ago, which around 2,000 years before the local Antarctica climate started warming by up to 8°C. This in turn led to a rise of CO2 of 80 parts per million (ppm). In other words, increases in carbon dioxide are effects, not causes of climate change.